User Account Setup

Introduction

A good place to put in notes about anything related to accounts in the CSCF context, whether they be user,
system, groups, etc. Technical notes. It can also include proposed newer setups such
as using Active Directory.

Definition: In a more general context the term account would tend imply the reckoning of a monetary balance, often with a history of credits and debits. In relation to computers, however, account is often used to refer to the login userid which works for some particular computer system whether or not any money is involved. To make things complicated, some software involved with login userid maintenance actually does allow for the use of related monetary accounts.

Account Management Methods

WatIAM Accounts

WatIAM Accounts - are required by, but not part of, other accounts maintenance.

Sponsors Data Accounts

Information about most accounts is maintained
on the UNIX computer cs-xh-admin.cs.private.uwaterloo.ca in the hierarchical text file
data base under the directory /software/accounts-master/data/sponsors.
Computer programs are used to update remote machines to reflect the
information there.
The software itself really only imposes a distinction between two
different types of accounts maintenance.

Registrar Sponsored Accounts - driven primarily by data automatically received from the Registrar's Office (graduate and undergraduate are not fundamentally different)

Other Accounts - no automatic information is used to drive the creation of these accounts; updates must be manual

Any other distinctions arise because of how the users of the software
decided to organize their data. Here
is an attempted explanation of the organization.

Any account can be associated with multiple groups,
primarily for purposes of access control.
It's not obvious we've documented details about group creation and maintenance.

Maintaining Specific Types of Accounts

Procedures are determined by a combination of the operating requirementsof thesponsors data base softwareand previouslyagreed-upon conventions in the organization of the filesit uses. Note that in some cases the conventions will have been agreed-uponby only a single person.Also sometimes constraints of other software helped determine the necessaryprocedures and conventions.

Creating Truly New Users (Userids)

This has been glossed over.
In many cases user names and identification numbers already exist,
precreated in WatIAM. In other limited cases,
the correct thing to do is create a userid which really should,
for various reasons, not be put in WatIAM.
And occasionally you need to do things to cause the
WatIAM account creation. Perhaps see these
notes.

The magic Userids file

But, in any case, before you can use the sponsors data
software to
create new accounts for a userid, that userid
must be defined in the file
/software/accounts-userids/data/Userids
(on the UNIX computer cs-xh-admin.cs.private.uwaterloo.ca).
Often, but not always, that happens automatically.
That's why it's magic.

The userinfo command will give no results
for the userid if it is not present in this file. That is, if
userinfo gives output, you can proceed. If not, more work is needed
to get the userid into the file.

If you think you need to modify or create records in this file, see these
notes or specifically these.

The old account configuration using the xhier packages setpw

accounts-client dissection

Active Directory

Windows account information is stored in their version of LDAP, called
ADS or active directory server, see CSCFActiveDirectory for some notes
on how this is done in CSCF.

Using ADS to authenticate Unix hosts

There is a project to have the student region authenticate using Windows Active Directory managed directory services.
Basic to this process is Kerberos version 5, see ADAddUbuntu for some notes
on how to get Ubuntu Linux to authenticate the ADS in the CS-GENERAL domain which would equally
apply to other domains.
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